Yasha Alfandari, President of the Jewish Community in Montenegro, member of the EAJC General Council, and Haris Dajch, Vice president of the Jewish Community of Belgrade will be at the end of December in Brussels, where they’ll try to convince EU officials to make the former Nazi death camp Sajmiste a historic site and the Holocaust Memorial.
11,870 Jews lived in Belgrade before the World War II. More than 7000 of them perished in Nazi concentration and extermination camp of Sajmiste, near the city of Belgrade, located on what was the Old Fairground. Today this place looks neglected and forgotten. "After the war the Sajmiste entered a new phase, after it was first the Belgrade Exhibition Grounds 1937-1941. Later the concentration camp became neglected for years and gradually started falling apart. Former fair buildings were awarded to some prominent artists, painters and sculptor, as their ateliers," said Haris Dajch in an interview with “European Jewish Press”. "So, at the moment there is a popular restaurant in the former Turkish Pavilion, which functioned both as a shower room and a makeshift morgue where the corpses were held during the war. At the place of the Jewish hospital we have a gym now; around most of the area are the unfinished barracks where homeless people are living."
In socialist Yugoslavia, the suffering of Jews tended to be interpreted as a manifestation of the broader "reign of terror" instituted by the Nazis against the civilian population. As a result, Jewish victims of the Holocaust were, for the most part, subsumed under the category of "victims of Fascism". "There are very worrying rumors that our Jewish community accepted the concept of the future Memorial where our victims would be represented among all others and where we, after 75 years, still wouldn’t have our own Memorial for all the Belgrade and Serbian Jews that perished in the Holocaust," Dajch says. "This approach will put us in a situation where in 10-15 years’ time  any mention of the Holocaust and any proof of our history won’t exist. The pattern is simple: first all the victims are put together, later the Jewish victims are less visible and in the final stage we will end up being forgotten. It’s not only about the Sajmiste Memorial it’s also about the future of Jews in Belgrade and Serbia." "The historical memory of what happened in the Shoah in Belgrade is in extreme danger," says Yasha Alfandari.
In Brussels Alfandari and Dajch will meet with Vera Jourova, the European Commissioner for Justice, Katharina von Schnurbein, the EU Special Coordinator on Combating Anti-Semitism, Federica Mogherini, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. Also they’ll have the opportunity to share their concerns with several EU ambassadors and in particular with Serbia’s Ambassador to EU.